Ink and Paper in the Camp. Ego-Documents of Luxembourger Conscripts in the Soviet Captivity

In the paper by Inna Ganschow, the camp experience in the Soviet Union as a result of forced conscription will be treated, specifically in its artistic processing: secretly written diaries and letters by Luxembourg Wehrmacht soldiers. Contemporary historical research today calls them ego documents – private, handwritten texts of a personal nature. The range of texts to be examined in the lecture ranges from the smuggled out notes and letters that their released comrades took with them to Luxembourg, through diaries, speeches and self-made dictionaries to poems, short stories and drawings, some of which were in the camp and some immediately after the return from Tambov and other camps in the Soviet Union. The focus is on the question of dealing with the thesis of the Auschwitz concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and neurologist from Vienna, that the meaning of camp life - logotherapy - can have a self-healing effect and increase the self-healing powers, which increases the chances of survival.